By his final three hours at Hi-Vator, Rahm had decided that, no, the Winged Ones were a very, very different people from his — but that it was precisely those differences that made them a people. With each new thought or realization or insight about them, however, there came a moment when Rahm would stand — now for seconds, now for minutes — still as the cliffs rising above him, his mind fallen miles below, turning among memories of the light- and blood-lashed night, trying to hold coherent the idea of a people of his own. When he stood so long like that, some of the Winged Ones watched or listened quietly. Others, better mannered, merely listened and pretended not to watch at all — though more and more mewed about it to one another, out of sight and hearing.
Among the stranger things that had happened to him that afternoon was a conversation he’d had with an old Winged One, whom Vortcir had been eager to have him meet for more than an hour now. The Winged One’s fur was more gray than brown. Her eyes were wrinkled closed.
Rahm and the ancient creature hung together on one of the rope webs above the waterfall while the old Winged One explained to Rahm that one of the most important ideas around which all the Winged Ones’ lives revolved was something called god — apparently a very hard thing to understand, since it was at once the universal love binding all living things and, at the same time, a force that punished evildoers even as it forgave them. Also it was a tree that grew on the bare peak of the world’s highest mountain, a tree older than the world itself, a tree whose roots required neither earth nor water — those roots having secreted the whole of the world under it, including the mountain it perched on. The tree’s leaves were of gold and iron. Its fruit conferred invisibility, immortality, and perfect peace. To make things even more complicated, for just a short while — twenty-nine years to be exact, the old Winged One explained — god had not been a tree at all, but rather a quiet, good, and simple woman with one deformed wing, who therefore could not fly and thus limped about the mountains’ rocks like a groundling. Various and sundry evil Winged Ones would come across her and attempt to cheat her or rob her or — several times — even kill her, only to be shamed by a power she had, called “holiness,” whereupon they repented and often became extremely good, fine, and holy people themselves for the rest of their lives, during which they did nothing but help other Winged Ones.
“There are other peoples,” the old Winged One told Rahm as she stretched over the knotted vines, “who represent god as a silver crow, while for others god is a young man strung up to die on a blasted tree…” which only confused Rahm further.
Still, something about the old Winged One made her comforting to listen to. Something in her manner recalled…Ienbar? The stories of the flightless god were gentle and good and took Rahm’s mind off the cataclysmic images just under memory’s surface.
Rahm climbed down from the rope net, curious as to why he felt better, but not convinced that this idea/tree/cripple was much more than a story with too many impossibilities to believe, so that while it might have had something he couldn’t quite catch to do with the world around him now, he couldn’t believe it had much to say of the world he’d left below.
The afternoon sun had lowered enough to gild the western edge of every crag and rock. At the fire, Winged Ones adjusted three mountain goats on wooden roasting spits. Walking up to another ledge, Rahm saw some others pounding nuts on a large rock with small stones held in their prehensile toes. Still others, on the ledge above that, had gathered hip-high heaps of fruit — yellow, purple, and orange — so that when, a few minutes later, Vortcir’s aunt came up to him and said: “There’s to be a feast tonight!” Rahm was not really surprised.
“In honor of the Handsman’s safe return?” Rahm asked.
“In honor of the groundling who saved him!” she declared, shrill and breathy. Then, with wings wide, she turned to drop over the rocky rim at his feet and crawl down a web.
Winged Ones carried a trestle over, piled with fruit and nut bread. “Have some,” Vortcir urged him. “Some of us have flown leagues and leagues to bring these to the nest.” They brought a chain for Vortcir, who insisted they bring another for Rahm. Vortcir’s aunt herself held it on the spurs of her wings and lowered it around Rahm’s neck with cooling, windy motions. Several Winged Ones made music on a rack of gongs, while youngsters flapped and scrambled over the rocks, flinging the scarlet, cerise, and leaf-green rinds at each other, now at a furry arm, now at a leg jerked back, from which the peel slid away, falling to the stone as the thrower mewed and the target squealed. Caves pitting the cliffside site echoed with chucklings and chitterings. Across the twelve-foot fire troughs, the spitted carcasses rolled above flame, fat dribbling and bubbling along the bottom of each beast.
“Here, Rahm!” Vortcir led him up to a stone rim. “You must make the first cut.” On his spur, Vortcir lifted a great cleaver, long as his thigh. Rahm turned to seize it by a handle carved for a grip wholly different from his own. He planted one foot on the pit stone. Their wings beating up spirals of sparks, the fire tenders swung the first spit out. Rahm raised the blade —
His eyes caught the red light running up the sharpened metal — and as he had done so many times that day, Rahm halted. His chest rose; breath stalled in it.
Some of the Winged Ones fell silent.
One of Vortcir’s wings opened to brush and brush at Rahm’s back, to smear the sweat that had in moments risen on Rahm’s shoulders, his forehead, his belly. “Friend Rahm, this blade is to cut the meat that we will all eat. Use it!”
Rahm swung the cleaver down. Crusted skin split. Juices rilled and bubbled along the metal. And Rahm grinned. The others chittered and laughed and mewed. Some even came up to compliment him on the dexterity with which he carved: “But then, you have so many little fingers….”
Lashed to a wooden fork, a leather sack dripped wine into a stone tub, from which, at one time or another, everyone went to drink. Three times Rahm found himself at the rim beside a female with granite-dark fur, a quick smile, and a sharp way of putting things in an otherwise genial manner. “So,” she said, when the wine had made Rahm feel better and they met again a ways from the food, “I overheard you talking to that blind old fool about god,” though she spoke the word “fool” with such affection as to make Rahm wonder if it meant the same to her as it did to him. “You know what the real center of our life here is? It isn’t god.”
“What is it, then?” Rahm asked.
Behind her, her wings…breathed, in and out of the indigo, out and into the firelight. “Actually, it’s money.”
“Money?” he asked. “Money. Now, what is money?”
Apparently it was more complicated than god. It too, she explained, was fundamentally an idea having to do with value — in this case, represented by the hard hulls of certain nuts treated with certain dyes, with certain symbols carved into them. You gave some of these hulls for everything you received or got some back for everything you gave — Rahm was not sure which; “everything” included food, sex, and entertainment, labor, shelter, and having certain rituals performed for you by the Handsman or the Queen.
“I’d like to see some,” he said with polite interest, “of this money.”
She cackled, in a scrit as shrill as that of the beast he’d slain in the cave. “But that’s the whole problem, you understand. Nobody has any anymore!”
He was confused all over.
“We gave it up,” she explained, “years ago. When I was a girl — maybe eight or nine. We had a meeting of the whole nest site, and the Old Queen decided we’d be better off without it. So we went back to barter. But no one’s really forgotten it — I don’t care what the Old One says. Personally, I think it would be better if we had it back again, don’t you?”